Over the past few years, books like Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food and documentaries like Food Inc. have increasingly challenged us to ask: How much do we really know about the “food” we buy and consume on a daily basis?

In his recent book, Eating Animals, an exposé on fishing and factory farming, Jonathan Safran Foer finds George Orwell’s famous words written in Animal Farm to be particularly apt: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

There is growing concern about our unprecedented levels of meat consumption in North America, not to mention the ethical implications of the ways in which eggs and meat are now produced. Foer points out that while pigs are every bit as intelligent and feeling as dogs, in North America we are aghast at the very idea of eating dogs, let alone the aggressive, strategic processing of their body parts for consumption. Further, properly cooked dog meat poses no greater health risks than any other meat, yet thousands of dollars are spent to euthanize dogs each year. There are parallels to the North American taboo against dog eating in Europe and South Asia: “The French, who love their dogs, sometimes eat horses. The Spanish, who love their horses, sometimes eat their cows. The Indians, who love their cows, sometimes eat their dogs.” (Foer, 25)

Cramped conditions on factory farms have led to high levels of disease among the animals. Pigs, for example, are increasingly treated with antibiotics.

These taboos suggest that our cultural and social familiarity with animals guides our thinking about the treatment of the animals we eat. In North America, we are divorced from the conditions in which the latter live and die for our consumption more than ever before.

Chickens on a factory farm

The introduction of hybrid corn feed, de-beaking practices, chain-driven feeders, drugs and antibiotics, as well as slaughtering and processing market brands from the 1940s onwards have revolutionized the animal food industry. Family farms of the past have become factory farms run like corporations. Animals are now mass produced, confined in small spaces, injected with hormones, “processed” and shipped en masse to our grocery stores. More than ten million land animals are raised and killed for food every year in America alone. The consequences are massive, and directly linked to environmental destruction, world hunger, and flu epidemics. Damage has also pervaded fisheries. Modern industrial fishing lines can be up to 75 miles long, the same distance between sea level and space, and as much as 80 to 90% of sea creatures caught in these lines are bycatch – that is, killed “by accident.” Researchers and scientists predict the total collapse of all fished species in less than 50 years. They assert that human interactions with fisheries have come to resemble “wars of extermination.”

Our relationship to animal food has a rich, complex history. Be it animal torture, testing or human methods of breeding and killing fish, cows, pigs or chickens for our consumption, reformers have long campaigned for the rights of animals.

Within the broad humanitarian reform campaigns against slavery, vice, and child labour in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, William Wilberforce and his contemporaries founded the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. This first animal welfare organization would later become the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (1824). In 1809, two years after the legal abolition of the slave trade in Britain, Wilberforce presented a Cruelty to Animals Bill to the House of Commons. He and his contemporaries lobbied Parliament throughout the nineteenth century against animal baiting, cruelty and experimentation. 

Painting of the Trial of Bill Burns, the first prosecution under the 1822 Martin’s Act for cruelty to animals. Burns was found beating his donkey. His case is the first known prosecution for animal cruelty in the world. The prosecution was brought forward by Richard Martin, MP for Galway, also known as Humanity Dick, and the case became memorable because Martin brought the donkey into court.

Parallels have frequently been drawn between the legal status of animals and that of human slaves. Slaves in the past were compared to animals. Some still are. Animal rights campaigners are now comparing the abuse of animals to slavery. Before his death, Donald Watson, the inventor of veganism, argued “We can see quite plainly that our present civilization is built on the exploitation of animals, just as past civilizations were built on the exploitation of slaves.”

For some, “animal liberation” is the social justice movement for the next millennium – abolition for the twenty-first century. Many stress Ghandi’s famous words: “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”

Irrespective of our individual perspectives on this issue, we are facing sobering collective realities. Consider three: environmental, health and job quality concerns. Animal agriculture currently makes a 40% greater contribution to global warming than all transportation in the world combined. Nearly one-third of our earth’s land service is dedicated to livestock. The polluting strength of manure resulting from factory farmed animals is approximately 160 times greater than that of raw municipal sewage. In spite of this, limited waste-treatment infrastructure is in place. Further, studies have shown that those living nearby factory farms experience sore throats, coughing, runny noses, diarrhoea and abnormal levels of tension, depression, anger, fatigue and asthma, especially among children. Research also shows that the more meat one eats, the more likely one is to die of heart disease, cancer and stroke. Lastly, skilled farmers continue to be replaced with wage and contract “line workers” who, according to preliminary reports, are experiencing higher levels of stress and on-the-job injuries.

In spite of these concerns, global meat consumption is predicted to double by 2020, and countries like China and India are adopting Western methods of factory farming in order to supply their growing middle classes with meat and eggs.

Today, perhaps more than ever before, we are morally bound on multiple levels to consider: When is eating animals a good idea? Is it ethical?

UK Forced Marriage Unit Handbook

Editors Note: There are two parts to this post.  Part 1 is Karlee Sapoznik’s piece on Forced Marriage.  Part 2 is a summary of the launch and upcoming events for one of our partners, the Alliance Against Modern Slavery.

When we think of slavery, the institution of marriage rarely comes to mind. However, the denial of basic human rights and the enslavement of women and girls continue on a widespread scale, often centering on marriage.

Since the post World War II era, forced marriage has been prohibited under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), forbidden in dozens of international treaties recognizing the right to free and full consent in marriage, and specific forms of forced marriage have been defined as “slavery.”

On January 10, 1963, Canada joined a number of countries in ratifying the 1956 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery. Article I of the Supplementary Convention (1956) to the Slavery Convention (1926) prohibits any institution or practice whereby

(i) A woman, without the right to refuse, is promised or given in marriage on payment of a consideration in money or in kind; (ii) The husband of a woman, his family, or his clan, has the right to transfer her to another person for value received or otherwise; or (iii) A woman on the death of her husband is liable to be inherited by another person.

In February 2008, the Special Court for Sierra Leone found that the systematic, widespread forced impregnation, torture, rape, abduction, mutilation, forced labour and sexual slavery experienced by women and girls as “bush wives” during the conflict in Sierra Leone constituted a new crime against humanity: that of “forced marriage.”

Following this finding, this past February 24-26, 2011, York University Law & Society Professor Annie Bunting, The Coalition for Women’s Human Rights in Conflict Situations, Women’s Forum, and The Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the Global Migrations of African Peoples hosted an unprecedented international conference in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Historians of slavery, women’s human rights scholars, activists, survivors, legal scholars and local NGO representatives from Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Liberia, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo met in the Special Court for Sierra Leone to better understand and delineate forced marriage, sexual slavery and enslavement in conflict situations.

Special Court for Sierra Leone, photo taken by Karlee Sapoznik, February 24, 2011.

Groundbreaking research is also being conducted on forced marriage in non-conflict situations. Further, historians of slavery are now recognizing the extent to which slavery was rape, involving violent non-consensual conjugal arrangements. Data from the 35,000 slave voyages documented in the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database and from other sources reveals that African women – more than any other group – peopled the Americas based on violence and non-consensual sexual relations.

The 37-volume manuscript diary of Thomas Thistlewood (1721–1786) detailing his sexual conquests of slave women by location, time, name, date, age, African origins and frequency is well known. Douglas Hall’s In Miserable Slavery (1989) includes extensive excerpts from the Jamaican planter’s diary kept from 1750 to 1786. Based on the latter, Trevor Burnard has estimated that Thistlewood had sex 3,852 times with 138 slave women in thirty-seven years, including dozens of entries with one slave woman in particular named Phibbah whose son Jon was raised as his heir. Between 1751 and 1754 alone, Thistlewood recorded 265 “encounters” with over 45 slaves. He also documented the rape of female slaves by other white men.

Video Excerpt from Thomas Thistlewood’s Diary

Since the early 1990s, forced and servile marriages have increasingly come to the attention of numerous states. Canada is no exception. Every year, dozens of Canadian women and girls, and occasionally men and boys, are forced into marriages.

A 2005 report entitled “Who’s in charge here?: effective implementation of Canada’s international obligations with respect to the rights of children” by Canada’s Senate Standing Committee on Human Rights found that Canada has fallen behind other countries in meeting its international obligations, especially those with direct impact on children’s rights, including an action plan to combat forced and servile marriages.

While in some nations, governments have taken the leading role, implementing legislation focused on curtailing these practices, others, like Canada, have relied on nongovernmental organizations, especially women’s groups and legal aid organizations. Scholarly research in Canada is in its first generation, and in many ways an exercise in documenting cases involving longstanding as well as diasporic communities.

Tomorrow, Tuesday, March 8, 2011 is International Women’s Day. It is appropriate that Canadian documentary filmmaker Azra Rashid has chosen this date to screen and raise funds for her documentary Unveiling the Abuse. All are welcome to attend the event from 7:00pm-9:00pm at The Centre for Women at the University of Toronto, 563 Spadina Ave, Room 100, North Borden Building, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 2J7.

Unveiling the Abuse is about Canadian women who are being forced into marriages by their families under the guise of the age-old tradition of “arranged” marriage. The documentary also looks at whether Canada’s multicultural policies render women vulnerable to abuse at the hands of their family in the name of culture and tradition.

For more information:

-  Coalition for Women’s Human Rights in Conflict Situations

- “Forced to Wed” Toronto Star Article

- South Asian Legal Clinic of Ontario (SALCO) Forced Marriage Project

- Transatlantic Slave Trade Database

- Unveiling the Abuse – a documentary about forced marriages

********************************************************************

ALLIANCE AGAINST MODERN SLAVERY LAUNCH SUMMARY

On January 28-29, 2011, Active History participated in the launch of the Alliance Against Modern Slavery, which brought together international experts, government officials, law enforcement personnel, survivors of slavery and more to York University’s campus for a freedom concert and conference.

Approximately 150 people attended the Party for Freedom Concert in York’s beautiful Sandra Faire and Ivan Fecan Theatre. Highlights included Roger F. Cram’s inspiring keynote, a documentary on Slavery Past and Present, greetings by Judith Dueck on behalf of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Testimony from Glendene Grant – mother of missing human trafficking victim Jessie Foster, and performances by Samba Elegua Drummers, Kate Todd, Jeff Gunn and Janelle Belgrave of Peace Concept. Those in attendance also enjoyed fair trade chocolate, coffee and cookies from ChocoSol.

An estimated 270 people attended the Slavery in the 21st Century Conference from 9am to 5:30pm in York University’s Founders Assembly Hall. The seats were full to capacity, and those in attendance heard presentations by NGOs, activists, law enforcement and government officials doing work to end modern-day slavery in local and global communities.

Following this successful launch, AAMS is working on creating a list serv to help increase communication and organization among NGOs, survivors of modern slavery, politicians, law enforcement officials, activists, educators, academics and the general public.

AAMS is pleased to be participating in a number of upcoming events, including the Mississauga Library System’s ‘History Minds’ series, co-hosted with ActiveHistory.ca.

Other upcoming events include:

• March 8 – Loose Change to Loosen Chains Awareness Event, Vari Hall, York University, 10am-4pm

• March 8 – Film Screening and Fundraiser: The documentary screening of Unveiling the Abuse and a fundraiser with director Azra Rashid and forced marriage survivor Sandeep Chand will take place on International Women’s Day, Tuesday, March 8th from 7-9pm at: The Centre for Women @ The University of Toronto, 563 Spadina Ave, Room 100.

• March 9 – AAMS President / Co-founder Karlee Sapoznik will be speaking at Tapestry New Opera’s workshop presentation of “The Enslavement and Liberation of Oksana G.”

Tickets are now on sale for the first public showcase of “The Enslavement and Liberation of  Oksana G” workshop presentations of Act I in advance of its world premiere in a future season.  Sung by a cast of 16 in multiple roles in Ukranian, Russian and English, Oksana G. is written by Governor General’s Award-winning playwright and filmmaker Colleen Murphy and SOCAN Young Composer-award winning composer Aaron Gervais. For more information, please visit http://www.tapestrynewopera.com/2011/02/07/oksana-g-workshop-presentations-march-9-10/

The launch concert and conference organized by AAMS both received a considerable amount of media attention, including stories in the following online local, provincial and national publications:

• Missing Jessie Foster, February 4, 2011
• Catholic Register, February 3, 2011
• Torontoist, January 31, 2011
• Square Staff Canadian News, January 28, 2011
• Exchange Magazine, January 26, 2011
• YFile, January 25, 2011
• York University News and Events, January 25, 2011
• Active History, January 18, 2011
• Kamloops News, January 13, 2011

When you think of the Holocaust, what images immediately come to mind?  Perhaps you see the infamous Arbeit Macht Frei sign above the gated entry to Auschwitz I, emaciated bodies, crowded conditions, barracks in concentrations camps, yellow stars, victims forced to board trains, or tattoos that branded prisoners and slave labourers. For most people, images of gas chambers and of emaciated bodies of Jews, Poles, Gypsies, homosexuals and others in concentration camps like Auschwitz first come to mind when the Holocaust is mentioned.  The systematic murder of 2.25 million Jews during the “Holocaust by bullets” in present day Ukraine and Bella Russia between 1941 and 1944 is often forgotten, or simply overlooked.

These images reflect that more personal form of killing (editors note: some of these images are graphic):

A German soldier killing a mother and child at point-blank range

Waffen SS members shooting a Jewish man descending into a mass grave pit

Naked Jewish women, some of whom are holding children, waiting in line for their execution on October 14th 1942 in Miczocz, Rovno. © USHMM, courtesy of Instytut Pamieci Narodowej. Published source: Klee, ernst.

Jewish men being put into rows for execution by Waffen SS members and SD officers. Original photo caption: "Hitlerites shoot soviet citizens 1942". 1942. USSR. Photographer unknown. © Russian state archives of films and photo documents.

On Monday, October 4, 2010, Father Patrick Desbois, President of Yahad-in Unum and author of The Holocaust by Bullets: Uncovering the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews (2008), presented at an event in Toronto, Canada, hosted by the Holocaust Education Committee of the Jewish-Christian Dialogue of Toronto and Beth Tzedec Congregation. The type of research underway on the Holocaust by bullets by his team is as active as it gets. In village after village in present-day Ukraine, they are working with the public. Interviews with local witnesses more than 60 years after the fact provide harrowing accounts of the “Holocaust by bullets.” Using ballistic evidence to locate mass grave sites with the help of local witnesses, Father Patrick Desbois and others have revealed more on this unknown chapter of Holocaust history. Since 2004, they have interviewed over 800 eyewitnesses and identified more than 900 mass graves in Ukraine and Belarus. However, witnesses are dying and time is running out to capture their stories.

2490 bullet cases found by Desbois and his team in Khativ, Ukraine on the 15th of April, 2006.

Remains of a child under 10 next to those of an adult found in Busk by Desbois and his team

As their testimonies explain, after Operation Barbarossa, the code name for the German attack on the Soviet Union in June of 1941, special mobile extermination squads were organized to kill Jews by bullets in the former Russian occupied zone. Jews were rounded up in town ghettos and told they were to be relocated, only to be taken to the woods, to be shot. Their bodies were buried in mass graves.

Here is a map representing a sampling of the massacre sites:

The Nazis later determined it was more cost effective to kill Jews and other groups by inserting Zyclone B gas in large-scale gas chambers. However, in general, the public is more familiar with the gas chamber method of killing.

Last fall, I had the opportunity to travel to the Ukraine. I spent time doing research on the Holocaust by Bullets and interviewed witnesses in Rovno and Berezne. On August 25, 1942, 3,680 Jews were marched out of the Berezne ghetto and forced to help dig three mass grave pits, each 20 metres in length. They were then shot to death in rows of five. According to witnesses, the pits moved for three days, and blood leaked through the ground. Many of the children were simply thrown into the pits and pushed down so as not to waste a bullet. Some Ukrainians were forced to assist in the killings. Others willingly did so.

“]

Site of liquidation action in Berezne, where 3,680 were killed by bullets. [September, 2009

A number of Jews from Berezne were killed in the major city centre of Rovno, a 45 minute car ride away today. The total population of Rovno in 1939 was approximately 40,000, 30,000 of which were Jews. As witnesses explained and I saw firsthand, 17,500 people were killed by bullets at the mass grave site in Rovno, and approximately another 5,000 were thrown into a big stone quarry pit in Kostopil. The memorial area where the 17,500 were buried in mass pits in Rovno is overwhelming. It is very large and there are dozens of plaques with some of the names of those killed. Symbolic footprints commemorate their forced descent to their deaths.

In spite of the Einsatzgruppen Nuremberg trials from 1947 to 1948, material evidence (bullets and archival photos), accounts of local witnesses, and testimonies by rare survivors, the Holocaust by bullets in Berezne and Rovno, like in the Ukraine at large, remains shrouded in secrecy. It is not discussed, and rarely acknowledged in public. The active historical investigative work under way by Father Desbois and others is challenging that silence, and educating people around the world. The next time you read or hear the world “Holocaust,” I encourage you to picture bullets in addition to concentration camps and emaciated bodies. After all, 2.25 million out of the 6 million Jews who were murdered during the Shoah were killed by bullets.

For further information, see the following links:

-United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: http://www.ushmm.org/museum/exhibit/focus/desbois/

-CBC News The National Mini-Documentary Video: http://www.cbc.ca/thenational/indepthanalysis/story/2009/10/13/national-holocaustbybullets.html

-CBC News The National, Interview Transcript: http://www.cbc.ca/thenational/indepthanalysis/transcripts/story/2009/10/13/national-bullets-transcript1.html

“]

Karlee Sapoznik at Rovno memorial site, where 17,500 were killed by bullets. [September, 2009.

Whether it’s a Mars, Cadbury, Hershey, Nestle or Snickers chocolate bar, most of us relish biting into one of life’s most tasty, cheap indulgences: chocolate.

While the cocoa industry has profited from the use of forced labour in West Africa since the early nineteenth century, over the past decade more and more alarming reports of child slavery in the cocoa industry have come to the fore. Amadou, previously one of the over 200,000 estimated children to be enslaved in cocoa farms in the Ivory Coast alone, told Free the Slaves that “When people eat chocolate, they are eating my flesh.”

The Ivory Coast produces roughly half of the world’s cocoa today. In his recent documentary, entitled The Dark Side of Chocolate , Danish journalist Miki Mistrati seeks to answer the following question: “Is the chocolate we eat produced with the use of child labor and trafficked children?”

In effect, the question is really not whether the chocolate we eat is produced using child labour or trafficked children. Rather, it is twofold: where exactly is this happening and in what numbers? Further, how do we take further measures

Drissa’s scars from being beat after trying to escape

beyond what is already being done under the law, by the International Cocoa Initiative, the chocolate companies, local law enforcement, activists, the general public and grass roots organizations to truly end this?

The link between slavery and commodities is certainly not new. In the late eighteenth century, the British, like many other countries, directly profited from the slave trade and slavery as they took their tea or used slave-produced products on a daily basis. However, little by little, the London Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade succeeded in rallying popular sentiment against slavery and slave-produced commodities.

For instance, by 1791, thousands were boycotting sugar produced in the Caribbean, an important source of income and profits for much of Britain’s elite. As Adam Hochschild explains in Bury the Chains, “Ignited by several pamphlets, thousands of people, of all ranks and parties stopped using sugar…the boycott was largely put into effect by those who bought and cooked the family food: women.” (192-195). According to Thomas Clarkson’s calculations, no fewer than 300,000 Britons had abandoned the use of slave-produced sugar in the West Indies by 1791. As Clarkson conducted his travels, he reported that there was no town through which he passed in which there was not one person who had stopped using sugar.

Many authors in this time period emphasized the connection between British daily life and that of slaves. Famous poet, Robert Southey, spoke of tea as “the blood-sweetened beverage,” and Sir William Fox urged the tea drinker to “As he sweetens his tea, let him…say as he truly may, this lump cost the poor slave a groan, and this a bloody stroke with a cartwhip.”

At a time when many citizens could not vote, the sugar boycott provided the underrepresented with a chance to act when Parliament had yet to do so. Isaac Cruikshank’s “The gradual abolition of the slave trade: or leaving of sugar by degrees in 1792” pictured below embodies the outcry against the consumption of slave-produced sugar in England:

Earlier this month, on World Day Against Child Labour on June 12^th, renewed calls were made to take action to protect and end the abuses against the children trafficked into and exploited in cocoa farms in Ghana and the Ivory Coast from countries like Mali, Burkina-Faso and Togo.

This map provides a general idea of the source and destination countries involved:

Further, on June 14^th, the American government released its 2010 Trafficking in Persons Reports. Not surprisingly, according to the Report on Côte d’Ivoire,

“Boys from Ghana, Mali, and Burkina Faso are subjected to forced labor in the agricultural sector, including on cocoa, coffee, pineapple, and rubber plantations; boys from Ghana are forced to labor in the mining sector; boys from Togo are forced to work in construction; and boys from Benin are forced to work in carpentry and construction. Girls recruited from Ghana, Togo, and Benin to work as domestic servants and street vendors often are subjected to conditions of forced labor. Women and girls are also recruited from Ghana and Nigeria to work as waitresses in restaurants and bars and are subsequently subjected to forced prostitution. Trafficked children often face harsh treatment and extreme working conditions.”

Up to 40% of the chocolate we purchase, bring into our homes and eat may be contaminated with slavery. Whether boycotting or “buycotting” chocolate and other slave produced products constitutes part of the answer to resolving this issue remains to be seen.  At this point, some argue that there is no way of even knowing for certain if fair trade chocolate is slave free, for there are simply way too many middlemen in the process.

In spite of the lack of consensus on what is the solution, all parties agree that more needs to be done on every front. We need more education, more international pressure, better law enforcement, more preventative measures and more shelters and rehabilitation centres to make those currently enslaved or vulnerable to be enslaved in the cocoa industry slave proof.

We also need more bad press against the chocolate companies and individual farmers who continue to benefit from the dark side of chocolate we literally bite into on a daily basis. History shows us that popular outcry and pressure from below will be essential to this process.

Other websites of interest:

International Labour Rights Forum: The Cocoa Protocol: Success or Failure?

Interpol in Cote d’Ivoire

BBC on Cocoa Workers

By Karlee Sapoznik

As a former British colony, Canada abolished the slave trade over 200 years ago. However, slavery was certainly not eradicated with the legal abolition of the slave trade. Canadians still buy and sell human beings. In fact, Canada is currently a source, transit, and destination country for men, women, and children trafficked for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation and forced labour. According to the annual Trafficking in Persons (TIP) Report on Canada:

“Canadian women and girls, many of whom are Aboriginal, are trafficked internally for commercial sexual exploitation. Foreign women and children, primarily from Asia and Eastern Europe, are trafficked to Canada for commercial sexual exploitation, but victims from Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean also have been identified. Many trafficking victims are from Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, Vietnam, China, South Korea, the Philippines, Russia, and Ukraine. Asian victims tend to be trafficked more frequently to Vancouver and Western Canada, while Eastern European and Latin American victims are trafficked to Toronto, Montreal, and Eastern Canada. NGOs report that Canada is a destination country for foreign victims trafficked for labour exploitation; some labour victims enter Canada legally but then are subjected to forced labour in agriculture, sweatshops, or as domestic servants. A significant number of victims, particularly South Korean females, go through Canada en route to the United States. Canada also is a source country for child sex tourists, who travel abroad to engage in sex acts with minors.”

In spite of this, Canadian slavery has long been a neglected area of historical study. In his Histoire du Canada (1846), François Garneau promulgated the myth that slavery never existed in New France. He congratulated King Louis XIV and the French colonial clergy for having saved French Canada from this “grand and terrible plague.

Following suit, others maintained that there had been no slavery in New France and Canada, despite the historical evidence. We even have a Canadian Heritage Minute that celebrates Canadian involvement in helping fugitive American slaves escape to Canada through the Underground Railroad, overlooking our own dark legacies when it comes to slavery.

Marcel Trudel’s 1960 study of Aboriginal and African slavery in early Canada was the first effort to document the institution of slavery in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New France, a bold proposition in the 1960s when historians often contrasted “slaveless” Canada with its “corrupt” American counterparts. He established the demographic and geographic distribution of 4,000 known slaves, as well as the identity and social profile of their masters.

Whereas earlier works, marked by a tradition of denial towards any Canadian involvement in the slave trade, focused on New France and British political elites, depicting black slavery as a subsidiary issue within white Canadian life and largely taking Aboriginal slavery for granted as an inevitable consequence of colonization, more recent work on slavery in Canada confirms the existence of slavery, and illuminates the dynamic interactions among the Black, the Aboriginal, and the white Canadian in their shared experience of slavery.

Additionally, scholars have sought to dispel the notion that Canada experienced a more benign form of slavery than their plantation society counterparts in the United States and the West Indies. Overall, it is clear that a host of subjects remain insufficiently explored, especially the Aboriginal experience of slavery, and slavery and anti-slavery in Canada since legal abolition, especially in the form of human trafficking.

Human trafficking is one of a number of forms of modern slavery thriving in Canada and abroad. Others include bonded labour, forced labour, hereditary slavery, sex trafficking, servile forced marriage, child labour, and forced prostitution.

Although slavery is now illegal around the world, it is still widely practiced. Experts place the number of living modern slaves at 27 million, twice as many as the number of Africans enslaved during the four centuries of the transatlantic slave trade, and the equivalent to the entire population of Canada in the early 1990s.

Human trafficking constitutes a relatively small percentage of modern slavery overall, but is the second-largest and fastest-growing criminal industry in the world. It generates $32 billion in profits annually. Traffickers can make thousands of dollars a day.

While most countries have minimum legal sentences for those caught trafficking miners, there is currently no minimum sentence in Canada. In fact, drug traffickers currently serve more jail time than human traffickers do when caught in Canada. Bill C-268 introduced by MP Joy Smith seeks to change this by calling for a minimum five year sentence.

Like anti-slavery advocates in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, modern Canadian abolitionists have met with politicians and sent petitions and letters to their political representatives and senators since Bill-C268 was introduced in January of 2009. It is expected that Bill C-268 will be reviewed by the Senate Committee mid-May and be reported back to the Senate by the beginning of June. Following this, Bill C-268 will only have its Third Reading to complete before becoming law. (To view an extensive timeline of Bill C-268, see http://www.joysmith.ca/index.asp?ID=76&cat_ID=1&sub_ID=484)

Events to promote awareness, understanding and activism against human trafficking are occurring across Canada. On May 8th, 2010, one day before Mother’s Day, Canadians gathered at the Manitoba Legislature to participate in a Walk to Stop Human Trafficking.

A number of women and girls have gone missing over the past few decades in Canada. In Manitoba most of them were from First Nation reserves. Today we know that a large majority of these victims were victims of human trafficking and sexual exploitation. In Joy Smith’s words, “a minimum sentence is only part of the solution,” but will hopefully be the “tip of the iceberg” when it comes to tackling this form of modern slavery thriving in our own backyards.

********

For more information on human trafficking in Canada, click on the “article” heading at the website for Canada Fights Human Trafficking:  http://www.canadafightshumantrafficking.com/articles.html

For information on what predicts human trafficking, see the following report by Kevin Bales, President of Free the Slaves (Washington DC), and Professor of Sociology,

Roehampton University, London: http://www.freetheslaves.net/Document.Doc?id=18